Slaughter House Five

KURT VONNEGUT
Biography of Vonnegut

 Kurt Vonnegut, in full Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., (born November 11, 1922, Indianapolis,
Indiana, U.S.—died April 11, 2007, New York, New York), American writer noted for his
wryly satirical novels who frequently used postmodern techniques as well as elements of
fantasy and science fiction to highlight the horrors and ironies of 20th-century
civilization. Much of Vonnegut’s work is marked by an essentially fatalistic worldview
that nonetheless embraces modern humanist beliefs.
Continued…

 Vonnegut grew up in Indianapolis in a well-to-do family, although his father, an architect,

was unemployed during much of the Great Depression. As a teenager, Vonnegut wrote
for his high school newspaper, and he continued the activity at Cornell University in
Ithaca, New York, where he majored in biochemistry before leaving in 1943 to enlist in
the U.S. Air Force.
Continued…

 Captured by the Germans during World War II, he was one of the survivors of the
firebombing of Dresden, Germany, in February 1945. After the war Vonnegut took
graduate courses in anthropology at the University of Chicago while working as a
reporter. He was later employed as a public relations writer in upstate New York, but his
reservations about what he considered the deceitfulness of the profession led him to
pursue fiction writing full-time.
Continued…

 In the early 1950s Vonnegut began publishing short stories. Many of them were
concerned with technology and the future, which led some critics to classify Vonnegut as
a science fiction writer, though he resisted the label. His first novel, Player Piano (1952),
elaborates on those themes, visualizing a completely mechanized and automated society
whose dehumanizing effects are unsuccessfully resisted by the scientists and workers in a
New York factory town. For his second novel, The Sirens of Titan (1959), Vonnegut
imagined a scenario in which the entire history of the human race is considered an
accident attendant on an alien planet’s search for a spare part for a spaceship.
Continued…

 Vonnegut abandoned science fiction tropes altogether in Mother Night (1961; film 1996),
a novel about an American playwright who serves as a spy in Nazi Germany. In Cat’s
Cradle (1963) some Caribbean islanders, who practice a religion consisting of harmless
trivialities, come into contact with a substance discovered by an atomic scientist that
eventually destroys all life on Earth. (In 1963 the University of Chicago granted
Vonnegut a master’s degree in anthropology after he submitted Cat’s Cradle as a thesis.)
Continued…

 Although Vonnegut’s work had already gained a popular audience by the late 1960s, the
publication of Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade (1969; film 1972)
cemented his reputation. Explicitly drawing on his Dresden experience, Vonnegut crafted
an absurdist nonlinear narrative in which the bombing raid serves as a symbol of the
cruelty and destructiveness of war through the centuries. Critics lauded Slaughterhouse-
Five as a modern-day classic. Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday!
(1973; film 1999)—about a Midwestern businessman who becomes obsessed with
Trout’s books—is a commentary on writing, fame, and American social values,
interspersed with drawings by Vonnegut. Though reviews were mixed, it quickly became
a best seller.
Continued…

 While Vonnegut remained prolific throughout the 1980s, he struggled with depression
and in 1984 attempted suicide. His later novels include Deadeye Dick (1982), which
revisits characters and settings from Breakfast of Champions; Galápagos (1985), a
fantasy of human evolution told from a detached future perspective; Bluebeard (1987),
the fictional autobiography of an aging painter; Hocus Pocus (1990), about a college
professor turned prison warden; and Timequake (1997), a loosely structured meditation
on free will.
Continued…

 Vonnegut also wrote several plays, including Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970; film
1971); several works of nonfiction, such as the collection Wampeters, Foma &
Granfalloons (1974); and several collections of short stories, chief among which was
Welcome to the Monkey House (1968). In 2005 he published A Man Without a Country:
A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush’s America, a collection of essays and speeches
inspired in part by contemporary politics.
Continued…

 Vonnegut was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1973.
In 2010 the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library opened in Indianapolis. In addition to
promoting the work of Vonnegut, the nonprofit organization served as a cultural and
educational resource centre, including a museum, an art gallery, and a reading room.
Introduction

 Published in 1969, Slaughterhouse Five is a novel written in troubled times about

troubled times. As the novel was being finished in 1968, America saw the assassinations
of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. In the South, Blacks and their supporters
were struggling to overturn centuries of racial inequality under the law. At times, the
struggle became violent. American values were being convulsed by the coming-of-age of
the baby boomers. Never before had young people felt so certain in their rebellion
against their parents and their parents' values.
Continued…

 The United States was involved in a costly and unpopular war in Vietnam. 1968 saw the
psychologically devastating Tet Offensive, in which the Viet Cong launched a massive
offensive against American and South Vietnamese positions all throughout South
Vietnam. Although the Viet Cong took heavy casualties, the offensive was the true
turning point of the war. To the South Vietnamese people, the offensive proved that the
Americans could not protect them. To the American people, the offensive showed that the
war in Vietnam would be far more costly than the politicians in Washington had
promised. The country that had defeated the Axis powers just over two decades ago was
now involved in a morally dubious and costly war in a Third World country.
Continued

 In the U.S. opposition to the war grew, but in Vietnam the killing continued. The
Americans would eventually suffer fifty thousand dead, but the Vietnamese would pay a
much heavier price. Millions of Vietnamese died, many of them from heavy bombing.
The U.S. dropped more explosive power onto Vietnam than all of the world's powers had
dropped in all of World War II put together, including the two atomic bombs and the
bombing of Dresden and Tokyo. Vonnegut's novel about the bombing of Dresden was
written while American policy makers and pilots were implementing one of the most
brutal bombing campaigns in history.
Continued…

 Although Vonnegut despairs of being able to stop war (he likens being anti-war to being
anti-glacier, meaning that wars, like glaciers, will always be a fact of life),
Slaughterhouse Five is an earnest anti-war novel. Vonnegut's own war experiences turned
him into a pacifist. Like his protagonist, Vonnegut was present at Dresden as a POW
when American bombers wiped the city off the face of the earth. The bombing, which
took place on February 13, 1945, was the most terrible massacre in European history.
Over 130,000 people died, putting the death toll above the 84,000 people who died in the
Tokyo bombing and the 71,000 people who died in Hiroshima. In Europe's long and
often bloody history, never have so many people been killed so quickly. The novel is
disjointed and unconventional. Its structure reflects this important idea: there is nothing
you can say to adequately explain a massacre. Part of Vonnegut's project was to write an
antidote to the war narratives that made war look like an adventure worth having.
 Critical Summary of the
Novel
 is the story of Billy Pilgrim, a decidedly non-heroic man who has become "unstuck in
time." He travels back and forth in time, visiting his birth, death, all the moments in
between repeatedly and out of order. The novel is framed by Chapters One and Ten, in
which Vonnegut himself talks about the difficulties of writing the novel and the effects of
Dresden on his own life. In between, Billy Pilgrim's life is given to us out of order and in
small fragments. For the sake of clarity, this short summary will put Billy's life in
chronological order, although in the novel every chapter spans events over the course of
many years.
Continued…

 Billy is born in 1922 in Ilium, New York. He grows into a weak and awkward young
man, studying briefly at the Ilium School of Optometry briefly before he is drafted. After
minimal training, he sent to Europe right in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge. He is
captured behind German lines; before his capture is the first time he gets unstuck in time.
Continued…

 Billy and the other American POWs are temporarily shipped to a camp full of dying
Russians and a few pampered British officers. The Americans then are moved to
Dresden, a beautiful German city that has no major industries and no significant military
presence. No one expects Dresden to be bombed. But in the span of one night in
February of 1945, Dresden is bombed until almost nothing is left. 130,000 people die.
Continued…

 Billy and the other POWs wait out the bombing in a meat cellar. The next day at noon,
the come out and find a landscape that looks like the surface of the moon. With no food
or water, the POWs and four guards trek out to the suburbs. The American prisoners stay
in an innkeepers stable for a while, but soon the authorities round up POWs to excavate
the city for bodies. When that work is over, Billy and the other men return to the stable to
wait out the rest of the war. In May, Russians take the area and Billy is repatriated.
Continued…

 He goes back to Ilium to finish optometry school. After getting engaged to the daughter
of the school's owner, Billy has a mental breakdown and is committed to a veteran's
hospital. There, he is introduced to the science fiction of Kilgore Trout by a fellow
patient. After he is release, he marries Valencia as planned. Her father is wealthy, and
with a little help from him, Billy grows rich. Billy and Valencia have two children.
Continued…

 On the night of his daughter's wedding, Billy (as he claims) is kidnapped by aliens from
the planet Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians exist in the fourth dimension, and
consquently they have a completely different view of time. For them, all moments
happen simultaneously and always. They take him to their world and put him in a zoo,
where he mates with an actress called Montana Wildhack. Using a time warp, they return
him to a earth almost immediately after the moment that he left, so no one notices that he
has been missing for months.
Continued…

 He says nothing about the events until he suffers head injuries in a plane crash. His wife
dies almost immediately afterward. After he goes home, he runs off to New York and
goes on a radio talk show to talk about his alien abduction experiences and the
Tralfamadorian concept of time. His daughter Barbara, just twenty-one years old,
suddenly motherless and with a father who appears to be mentally unbalanced, takes care
of Billy but feels a great deal of resentment and frustration.
Continued…

 Billy claims to know how he will die. In 1976, after the U.S. is split into petty nations
and Chicago is hydrogen-bombed "by angry chinamen," Billy is killed by a high-
powered laser gun.
Characters

 Kurt Vonnegut
 The novelist inserts himself in the sections of Chapters One and Ten that frame Billy
Pilgrim's story. For many years, Vonnegut tried to write a book about Dresden but found
himself unable to handle the project. He appears within the Billy Pilgrim story very
briefly, in the literary equivalent of a cameo. The framing sections are vital in clarifying
Vonnegut's goals in writing the novel, among them the publication of an anti-war book.
Continued…

 Bernard O'Hare
 Vonnegut's old war buddy, captured with him and held as a POW in Dresden. Vonnegut
looks him up years later so that they can reminisce about their war experiences. But the
two men find they cannot remember anything good.
Continued…

 Mary O'Hare
 The novel is dedicated to her. She is Bernard's wife and she initially views Vonnegut's
novel-in-progress critically, worrying that he will write a book that glorifies war.
Continued…

 Billy Pilgrim
 An unconventional protagonist for a war novel, Billy is weak, passive, and often
ridiculous. He is totally unsuited for war, and he nearly dies wandering behind German
lines during the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he becomes an optometrist, marries a
rich girl, and comes to believe that he has been abducted by aliens called
Trafalmadorians. He is "unstuck in time," meaning that he experiences the events of his
life out of order again and again.
Billy as a Protagonist

 Billy Pilgrim is the protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five. The novel opens with a

description of Billy becoming “unstuck in time,” and the rest of the story follows him as
he time-travels through different moments in his life and struggles to make sense of the
tragic aftermath of war. Billy first time-travels while serving as a chaplain’s assistant in
World War II, a time in which he lacks proper military attire, lugs around a gaudy altar
and organ, and has no weapons or friends. As Billy continues serving in the war, his lack
of military know-how and inability to endure hardship become further apparent, making
his survival even more confounding. While everyone around him dies throughout the
novel—Billy’s father, Roland Weary, the people of Dresden, his wife, fellow passengers
in the plane crash—Billy survives, indicating that death does not discriminate between
the strong and weak.
Continued…

 Billy struggles not with death, but with his memories of war, which he can only escape
by accepting the Tralfamadorian idea that time is simply an illusion, and the line between
life and death is not as clear as “Earthlings” believe. After surviving an airplane crash,
Billy decides to publicly share this philosophy, and discuss how he was captured by the
Tralfamadorians and brought to their planet. While Billy’s family grows concerned about
his welfare after he shares these insights, the novel centers on Billy more than on these
supporting characters, and Vonnegut chooses not to define whether Billy’s mental state is
one of insanity or of enlightenment, further illustrating how war blurs the lines between
right and wrong.
Continued…

 Roland Weary
 An anti-tank gunner who gets captured with Billy. Deeply lonely, he imagines war stories
full of camaraderie and adventure. Dumb, fat, and cruel, he dies of gangrene and blames
Billy.
Continued…

 Edgar Derby
 Referred to consistently as "poor Edgar Derby" or "poor old Edgar Derby," Derby is a
forty-four-year-old who had to pull strings to be allowed to fight. Back home, he is a high
school teacher. He is shot after the Dresden bombing for stealing a teapot.
Continued…

 Paul Lazarro
 Tiny, weak, physically repulsive, Lazarro is foul-tempered and cruel. He talks about
tracking down people after the war to send hitmen after them. He holds that revenge is
life's sweetest pleasure.
Continued…

 Valencia
 Billy's wife. She is the overweight daughter of the owner of Billy's optometry school. She
is completely devoted to Billy. When Billy is injured in a plane crash, she dies of carbon
monoxide poisoning on the way to the hospital.
Continued…

 Barbara
 Billy's daughter. She is responsible for him after his injuries and Valencia's death, and the
burden makes her resentful and picky.
Continued…

 Robert
 Billy's son. Through he was a troublemaker in high school, Robert goes on to be a Green
Beret who fights in Vietnam.
Antagonist

 The primary antagonist in Slaughterhouse-Five is not a character, but World War II itself.
As his father mentions in the first chapter, Vonnegut “never wrote a story with a villain in
it,” and this rings true as Billy Pilgrim struggles with the traumatic effects of war far
more than he is antagonized by characters around him. Billy copes with his trauma by
becoming “unstuck in time,” which first happens after a particularly distressing defeat at
the Battle of the Bulge. Throughout the rest of the novel,
Continued…

 Billy goes in and out of time, maneuvering between various moments in his life in an
effort to suppress memories of war, especially the bombing of Dresden. Billy doesn’t
come to terms with this tragic event until nearly twenty years later, when a barbershop
quartet reminds him of the German guards in Dresden. Unexpectedly, Billy fills with
grief, and wonders why the song affects him “so grotesquely,” especially after supposing
for years “that he had no secrets from himself.” Apparently, time-traveling has not
provided a fool-proof outlet for Billy to escape his trauma, and his unresolved memories
of the war still hold power over him.
Setting of the Novel

 Slaughterhouse-Five has several settings: Germany and Luxembourg during World War
II, Ilium, New York during the post-war period, and Tralfamadore, the alien planet where
Billy is kept in a zoo. The most significant setting in the novel seems to be the German
city of Dresden, which haunts Billy the rest of his life. After the bombing that kills
thousands of civilians, the cratered Dresden looks like curves on “the face of the moon,”
adding a surreal quality to this setting.
Continued…

 Billy can distance himself from the destruction in Dresden by believing that it is not a
real city on Earth, but rather another setting in outer space completely removed from his
own world. Billy is prone to dissociate from trauma, and this tendency explains why he
believes he was abducted by aliens and forced to live on the planet Tralfamadore: he
needs to “reinvent [his] universe” in order to make sense of his life after the war, and
imagining a place in which death is normal helps Billy cope with the overwhelming
number of deaths he witnessed in Dresden.
Themes

 Time and memory

 The science fiction elements of the novel include time travel. Billy leaps in time,
experience his life's events out of order and repeatedly. He learns on the alien world of
Trafalmadore that all time happens simultaneously; thus, no one really dies. But this
permanence has its dark side: brutal acts also live on forever. Memory is one of the
novel's important themes; because of their memories, Vonnegut and Billy cannot move
past the Dresden massacre. Billy leaps back in time to Dresden again and again, but at
critical points we see Dresden simply because Billy relives it in his memory.
Continued…

 Narrative versus non-narrative and anti-narrative

 This is a broad theme that encompasses many important ideas. Vonnegut is interested in
protecting his novel from becoming a conventional war narrative, the kind of
conventional narrative that makes war look like something exciting or fun. Throughout
the book, we see narratives of this kind in history texts and the minds of characters. But
this novel is more interested in non-narrative, like the nonsense question asked by birds
at the novel's end, or anti-narrative, like the out-of-order leaping through the many parts
of Billy's life. Vonnegut does not write about heroes. Billy Pilgrim is more like a victim.
Continued…

 The relationship between people and the forces that act on them
 This theme is closely connected to the idea of narrative. Vonnegut's characters have
almost no agency. They are driven by forces that are simply too huge for any one man to
make much of a difference. Vonnegut drives home this point by introducing us to the
Trafalmadorians and their concept of time, in which all events are fated and impossible to
change.
Continued…

 Acceptance
 One of the book's most famous lines is "So it goes," repeated whenever a character dies.
Billy Pilgrim is deeply passive, accepting everything that befalls him. It makes him able
to forgive anyone for anything, and he never seems to become angry. But this acceptance
has it problems. When Billy drives through a black ghetto and ignores the suffering he
sees there, we see the problem with complete acceptance. Vonnegut values the
forgiveness and peace that come with acceptance, but his novel could not be an "anti-war
book" if it called on readers to completely accept their world.
Continued…

 In Vonnegut's view, war is not heroic or glamorous. It is messy, often disgusting, and it
robs men of their dignity. The problem of dignity comes up again and again in the novel,
as we see how easily human dignity can be denied by others. But Vonnegut also
questions some conceptions of dignity; he sees that they have a place in creating
conventional war narratives that make war look heroic.
Continued…

 The Destructiveness of War

 Whether we read Slaughterhouse-Five as a science-fiction novel or a quasi-
autobiographical moral statement, we cannot ignore the destructive properties of war,
since the catastrophic firebombing of the German town of Dresden during World War II
situates all of the other seemingly random events. From his swimming lessons at the
YMCA to his speeches at the Lions Club to his captivity in Tralfamadore, Billy Pilgrim
shifts in and out of the meat locker in Dresden, where he very narrowly survives
asphyxiation and incineration in a city where fire is raining from the sky.
Continued…

 However, the not-so-subtle destructiveness of the war is evoked in subtle ways. For
instance, Billy is quite successful in his postwar exploits from a materialistic point of
view: he is president of the Lions Club, works as a prosperous optometrist, lives in a
thoroughly comfortable modern home, and has fathered two children. While Billy seems
to have led a productive postwar life, these seeming markers of success speak only to its
surface. He gets his job not because of any particular prowess but as a result of his father-
in-law’s efforts. More important, at one point in the novel, Billy walks in on his son and
realizes that they are unfamiliar with each other. Beneath the splendor of his success lies
a man too war-torn to understand it. In fact, Billy’s name, a diminutive form of William,
indicates that he is more an immature boy than a man.
Continued…

 Vonnegut, then, injects the science-fiction thread, including the Tralfamadorians, to

indicate how greatly the war has disrupted Billy’s existence. It seems that Billy may be
hallucinating about his experiences with the Tralfamadorians as a way to escape a world
destroyed by war—a world that he cannot understand. Furthermore, the Tralfamadorian
theory of the fourth dimension seems too convenient a device to be more than just a way
for Billy to rationalize all the death with he has seen face-to-face. Billy, then, is a
traumatized man who cannot come to terms with the destructiveness of war without
invoking a far-fetched and impossible theory to which he can shape the world.
Continued…

 The Illusion of Free Will

 In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut utilizes the Tralfamadorians, with their absurdly
humorous toilet-plunger shape, to discuss the philosophical question of whether free will
exists. These aliens live with the knowledge of the fourth dimension, which, they say,
contains all moments of time occurring and reoccurring endlessly and simultaneously.
Because they believe that all moments of time have already happened (since all moments
repeat themselves endlessly), they possess an attitude of acceptance about their fates,
figuring that they are powerless to change them. Only on Earth, according to the
Tralfamadorians, is there talk of free will, since humans, they claim, mistakenly think of
time as a linear progression.
Continued…

 Throughout his life, Billy runs up against forces that counter his free will. When Billy is
a child, his father lets him sink into the deep end of a pool in order to teach him how to
swim. Much to his father’s dismay, however, Billy prefers the bottom of the pool, but,
against his free will to stay there, he is rescued. Later, Billy is drafted into the war against
his will. Even as a soldier, Billy is a joke, lacking training, supplies, and proper clothing.
He bobs along like a puppet in Luxembourg, his civilian shoes flapping on his feet, and
marches through the streets of Dresden draped in the remains of the scenery from a
production of Cinderella.
Continued…

 Even while Vonnegut admits the inevitability of death, with or without war, he also tells
us that he has instructed his sons not to participate in massacres or in the manufacture of
machinery used to carry them out. But acting as if free will exists does not mean that it
actually does. As Billy learns to accept the Tralfamadorian teachings, we see how his
actions indicate the futility of free will. Even if Billy were to train hard, wear the proper
uniform, and be a good soldier, he might still die like the others in Dresden who are
much better soldiers than he. That he survives the incident as an improperly trained joke
of a soldier is a testament to the deterministic forces that render free will and human
effort an illusion.
Continued…

 The Importance of Sight

 True sight is an important concept that is difficult to define for Slaughterhouse-Five. As
an optometrist in Ilium, Billy has the professional duty of correcting the vision of his
patients. If we extend the idea of seeing beyond the literal scope of Billy’s profession, we
can see that Vonnegut sets Billy up with several different lenses with which to correct the
world’s nearsightedness. One of the ways Billy can contribute to this true sight is through
his knowledge of the fourth dimension, which he gains from the aliens at Tralfamadore.
He believes in the Tralfamadorians’ view of time—that all moments of time exist
simultaneously and repeat themselves endlessly. He thus believes that he knows what
will happen in the future (because everything has already happened and will continue to
happen in the same way).
Continued…

 One can also argue, however, that Billy lacks sight completely. He goes to war, witnesses
horrific events, and becomes mentally unstable as a result. He has a shaky grip on reality
and at random moments experiences overpowering flashbacks to other parts of his life.
His sense that aliens have captured him and kept him in a zoo before sending him back to
Earth may be the product of an overactive imagination. Given all that Billy has been
through, it is logical to believe that he has gone insane, and it makes sense to interpret
these bizarre alien encounters as hallucinatory incidents triggered by mundane events
that somehow create an association with past traumas. Looking at Billy this way, we can
see him as someone who has lost true sight and lives in a cloud of hallucinations and
self-doubt. Such a view creates the irony that one employed to correct the myopic view
of others is actually himself quite blind.
Continued…

 The Inevitability of Death

 Death pervades Slaughterhouse-Five, and Vonnegut uses a consistently matter-of-fact tone to
describe each of Billy’s encounters with death, whether it be the catastrophic bombing of
Dresden or the candles made from the fat of slain prisoners. After every mention of death
and mortality, Vonnegut explores the mystery and inevitability of death with his “so it goes”
refrain. While the repetition of this phrase comes across as cold and irreverent, it more likely
reflects Billy Pilgrim’s adoption of Tralfamadorian philosophy. The Tralfamadorians teach
Billy that time is not a linear event, and therefore Billy’s death has already happened and he
cannot control the circumstances surrounding his death. Billy finds comfort in this idea that a
corpse is simply a person “in bad condition in that particular moment,” but that same person
is “just fine” in other moments. Therefore, death is nothing to spend too much time
commenting on and obsessing over.
Continued…

 Throughout Slaughterhouse-Five, death is depicted as more of an inevitable experience

than as an end to one’s life. For example, Billy “has seen his own death many times”
throughout his time-travels, so when his day of death finally arrives, Billy remains serene
and good-humored. After Paul Lazzaro shoots Billy, the narrator says Billy “experiences”
death instead of describing him as actually dying, and then Billy “swings back into life
again.” Billy’s complete acceptance of death may indicate that the Tralfamadorians are a
figment of his imagination, an intricate coping mechanism to explain the prolific deaths
he witnessed throughout the war. In believing that death is merely an experience, Billy
can trust that everyone who died during the Dresden bombing is still alive and well
somewhere.
Motifs

 “So It Goes”
 The phrase “So it goes” follows every mention of death in the novel, equalizing all of
them, whether they are natural, accidental, or intentional, and whether they occur on a
massive scale or on a very personal one. The phrase reflects a kind of comfort in the
Tralfamadorian idea that although a person may be dead in a particular moment, he or
she is alive in all the other moments of his or her life, which coexist and can be visited
over and over through time travel. At the same time, though, the repetition of the phrase
keeps a tally of the cumulative force of death throughout the novel, thus pointing out the
tragic inevitability of death.
Continued…

 The Presence of the Narrator as a Character

 Vonnegut frames his novel with chapters in which he speaks in his own voice about his
experience of war. This decision indicates that the fiction has an intimate connection with
Vonnegut’s life and convictions. Once that connection is established, however, Vonnegut
backs off and lets the story of Billy Pilgrim take over. Throughout the book, Vonnegut
briefly inserts himself as a character in the action: in the latrine at the POW camp, in the
corpse mines of Dresden, on the phone when he mistakenly dials Billy’s number. These
appearances anchor Billy’s life to a larger reality and highlight his struggle to fit into the
human world.
Symbols

 The Bird Who Says “Poo-tee-weet?”

 The jabbering bird symbolizes the lack of anything intelligent to say about war. Birdsong
rings out alone in the silence after a massacre, and “Poo-tee-weet?” seems about as
appropriate a thing to say as any, since no words can really describe the horror of the
Dresden firebombing. The bird sings outside of Billy’s hospital window and again in the
last line of the book, asking a question for which we have no answer, just as we have no
answer for how such an atrocity as the firebombing could happen.
Continued…

 The Colors Blue and Ivory

 On various occasions in Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy’s bare feet are described as being
blue and ivory, as when Billy writes a letter in his basement in the cold and when he
waits for the flying saucer to kidnap him. These cold, corpselike hues suggest the
fragility of the thin membrane between life and death, between worldly and otherworldly
experience.
Tone

 Tone The narrator’s tone is familiar and ironic, and he uncovers touches of dark humor
and absurdity that do not diminish the lyrical and emotional power of the material. His
portrayal of Billy is intimate but ambivalent, and he occasionally emphasizes the diction
of reported speech (prefacing a passage with “He says that” or “Billy says”) to draw a
distinction between reality and Billy’s interpretation of events.